Review: Guardians of the Galaxy

Guardians of the Galaxy was out of this world, in part because we paid only $11.50 for two matinee tickets. Where do you get this kind of price to see a movie in 2014? It was in Amherst, Massachusetts in our case, which was where we were house hunting at the time. So this review is about a month late. Sorry about that.

What Star Wars has spun! Nearly forty years after the release of the classic first movie, it still spins off space operas, and Guardians of the Galaxy is the latest near Star Wars summer blockbuster. The movie has nothing directly to do with Star Wars, of course, but it has many of its classic trademarks. It’s actually another Marvel comic book spinoff.

Space operas have become so institutionalized that you don’t even need to explain them anymore; they are as familiar as westerns. Of course there must be some sort of evil overlord, in this case Ronan, head of a race called the Kree that has its head up its ass and won’t let anything stop it in is quest to control the galaxy. The Milky Way Galaxy of course is an impossibly huge place, with 100-400 billion stars and a girth of 120,000 light years. Minor matters like its size and limiting factors like the speed of light don’t matter in the space opera genre and sure doesn’t here. Like Star Trek, we just somehow figure we’ve solved all these problems so we can wrap a story around it. In this case the galaxy has to be saved in 122 minutes, including credits.

The ultimate motivation for a movie is to make gobs of money, so director James Gunn did his best to tie it sort of to the present. Peter Quill (Chris Pratt) is mysteriously abducted by aliens shortly after his beloved mother dies abruptly. There is not much to remember her except a picture, a cassette with a mix of some 1980s pop music his mom made for him and an apparently indestructible boom box, which Peter takes with him. (Luckily, they rest of the universe has a handy supply of D batteries for his boom box.) The music becomes central to an adult Peter’s life and to keeping us engaged in the movie. For if Peter is involved in any action, he is probably doing it with the boom box on and one of his mother’s mixes playing. You can sort of dance your way through battle sequences in this movie.

Peter is now a space pirate working for a group called the Ravagers. Peter manages to steal the orb which Ronan needs to win control of the universe, so naturally the galaxy is focused on him, including a sassy genetically engineered raccoon who is also a bounty hunter named Rocket (Bradley Cooper) and his sort of Chewbacca sidekick Groot, an intelligent tree with an extremely limited vocabulary who is kind of cute and is more into expressing himself through action rather than words. There are other memorable characters like a green human-like woman Gamora (Zoe Saldana), and a Hulk-like alien Drax (Dave Bautista). Peter is more than a little like Hans Solo with perhaps a bit of a soft side, but mostly he is one of many sarcastic creatures that haunt this movie.

Since it’s a space opera, it’s much more of a popcorn movie than it is out to impart any particular deep thoughts. Its large box office receipts and how it has stayed at or near the top of the box office charts for the second half of the summer attest to its success. The characters are well drawn and they interact well enough with each other, and Rocket the sassy raccoon is particularly memorable. The CGI is seamless too but we sort of expect there will be enormous space battles with thousands of Millennium Falcon-like crafts to partake in them, in this case to save a planet full of good guys.

Part of the movie’s success has been its noted lack of competition. This has been a miserable summer for the movies, reflecting perhaps a lack of imagination from Hollywood. There’s not much new here either as it hoes a well-tilled genre. It’s just a shame though that a really good space opera like Serenity (2005) failed to take off, perhaps due to poor timing (released in late September) while this better than most Star Wars clone makes far more money. Serenity is more adult while this is not, and that may explain Guardians’s success in general. We’re not looking for plausibility; we’re just looking for action with decent characterization. If that’s your criteria and you haven’t seen Guardians, it’s still playing. If you’d rather spend the time seeing an excellent space opera, then rent or stream Serenity instead.